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Captain Kwok said:
Any other AI observations from v1.02?
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I haven't had a chance to play a great deal, but it seems that the AI is now relatively competitive in terms of ship numbers, resources &c, but it still doesn't make effective use of it's ships.
It does something I've seen in a lot of 4x games, including SEIV and various Civ incarnations. It moves its ships around in small groups, apprantly at random. Whereas what those ships should be doing is sitting on important planets unless the AI is at war, in which case they should be off attacking enemy planets, in groups of 20 or 30 not 7 or so at a time.
I predict that a humam player could win a war against an AI with equivilant ship design and technology and a 2:1 advantage simply because of the AI's fleets are all over the place.
Consider the attached screen shot. It's a small map, so this is the Phong's only system. They're at war with both the Norak and the Sergetti. The Norak ship has been sitting there ever since I put my ship in the system to observe the AI's fighting a war with each other. The Sergetti planet is more recent, but it's been there for 3 or 4 turns and hasn't been attacked.
Now, I know whatever you did to make the AI attack targets works because my own ship got attacked exploring another empires system, an I'm seeing plenty of combats between the AIs during turn processing. But one thing I noticed in my last game is that an AI fleet, if it has orders, will not cancel them to do something else. That is, if you have a single ship near one of their fleets it's safe from attack because the fleet probably has orders to go somewhere and won't break off to attack your ship.
Now, according to the score card the Phong have 18 ships. Where are they? Off on some mysterious errand, that's where. And while they're excuting orders to move about randomly, they won't be given orders to attack anything. And when ships do get attack orders, there's two few of them to make an effective attack force because the empire's fleet is so fragmented. Meanwhile, any sentient player can just bulldoze the barely defened AI planets with just a few ships almost irriguardless of their fleet size.
Getting the AI to use it's ships probably is, in my estimation, the last major obsitcle for a really decent, competitive AI.